


all the world bowing

by estora (orphan_account)



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Daud, Demiromantic Daud, Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches, F/M, Gen, High Chaos Emily Kaldwin, M/M, Medium Chaos (Dishonored), Medium Chaos Corvo Attano, Medium Chaos Daud, The Knife of Dunwall, mute corvo, please comment the author needs validation, transgender character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-19 10:42:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9436664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/estora
Summary: She feels the Void flow through her veins, her heart of metal and wire, her throat, moving her tongue by its own accord. “Your hands do violence,” the Void whispers, though hers are the lips that speak, “but there is a different dream in your heart."It is 1837 when Jessamine Kaldwin falls not to an assassin's blade, but to the witch Delilah.On the day the Empress's throne is usurped by the half-sister she betrayed and denied when they were both children - on the day her daughter is claimed by the witch and her bodyguard imprisoned - the man who'd intended to kill her makes a choice not even the Outsider himself could have predicted.





	1. Daud | the path he has chosen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [taywen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/taywen/gifts).



> This is both dedicated to and completely the fault of [taywen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/taywen/). It started with me joking that while Sokolov thinks Emily's drawings are trash, ironically if _Delilah_ was Emily's art instructor, Emily could've been Dunwall's equivalent of Picasso. And then taywen egged me on, and things... kind of spiralled from there. So, yes. Blame taywen for ~~most~~ _all_ of this.

The official way to describe the reasons a situation has deteriorated is because of ‘bad intel’, but Daud much prefers the term ‘colossal fuck-up’.

When one has a reputation as Dunwall’s finest assassin, one cannot afford for the jobs to go wrong. When jobs go wrong – especially high-profile ones – word spreads like wildfire, and then the contracts stop coming and the nobles find other assassins capable of doing the job better. That’s _how_ Daud got his start in Dunwall all those years ago, as a younger man with fire in his blood, desensitised to the feel of death on his blade. He killed without remorse and he did it effectively, far better than every other group in this Void-forsaken rotting graveyard of a city; why not get paid for his troubles too?

Thing is, he rarely makes mistakes, which is what makes him such a valuable commodity amongst the nobility. He goes in with his team, he completes the job cleanly, and he gets out. Half the money must be paid upfront; the other half afterwards. Since that one time when he was first starting out, the nobles know now to never – _ever_ – to cheat the Knife of Dunwall out of the full cut of his payment. His name and face can be plastered over as many WANTED posters as the City Watch likes – it doesn’t change the fact that his worth to the nobles alive and free is far greater than the pithy reward money. Mistakes are only made when he relies on information that he did not gather himself; when he relies on guarantees and promises that _certain people_ will not be around, and that _certain arrangements_ have been made to ensure his targets will be alone.

It’s his own fault for relying on the word of Hiram fucking Burrows.

Daud should have aborted the hit the moment he saw the Royal Protector on the pavilion alongside the Empress – a man, Hiram Burrows had assured him, who would _not_ be there. Still, Daud had a deadline, and one man, no matter how skilled with a blade, was no match for a team of assassins cursed with supernatural abilities. Inconvenient, but not a major hindrance.

It’s the _witches_ that truly take him by surprise.

The first absurd thought that comes to mind, when he watches Hiram Burrows screaming as he staggers his way up the steps to the pavilion, is that Corvo Attano must have found out somehow that Daud was coming, accounting for his early return. More absurdly, Daud’s next thought is that Attano was fool enough to enlist the aid of witches to fight off his assassins instead of doing the normal, _non-insane_ thing, such as simply alerting the Royal Guard.

It’s this that stuns Daud into inaction, his blade faltering mere seconds before sliding through the Empress’s ribs and stilling her heart. The moment of hesitation, of confusion, is enough for Jessamine Kaldwin to twist out of his grip around her neck, shoving him backwards with a surprisingly strong push for a woman so slight, and rushes to her fallen bodyguard who is pushing himself to his arms, no longer tethered out of reach.

“ _HELP!_ ” Hiram Burrows howls over the chorus of dying, agonised screams from the courtyard as the witches decimate the Royal Guards and servants, a river of blood watering the shrubs.

Even if he’d cared to, Daud does not help; he merely watches on in abject disbelief as a vine explodes from the ground beneath the small, worried man and impales him from behind, bursting through his chest with enough force to haul him off his feet. Blood spurts from the wound and from Burrows’ mouth, and with a flick the vine tosses him to the side, his mangled corpse flying across the courtyard.

Well, then.

Daud growls and gestures sharply for his Whalers to retreat, and the girl – Lady Emily – wrenches herself from Billie’s grasp, flying into her mother’s outstretched arms.

“Stay back!” the Empress cries, catching her daughter, and Corvo Attano has returned to his feet, his sword at the ready before Daud.

Witches were _not_ part of this colossally fucked-up arrangement. He begins to retreat, his Whalers transversing back across the roofs the way they came. Only Billie remains by his side, the air around her seething with fury.

“Daud,” she hisses.

He shakes his head and ducks behind one of the pillars of the pavilion, intending to follow his men into retreat, just as several vines burst from the ground to wrap to around Attano and the Empress, immobilising them out of each other’s reach.

The girl screams for her mother, for Corvo, who both yell at her to _run, Emily, get somewhere safe!_ But if the witches aren’t working for Attano, Daud realises, and they aren’t working for _Daud_ –

_Oh, hell._

Daud smells rather than sees her first. A bitter tang in the air, an almost foul mixture of aged roses and mint, like the poisons his mother used to brew in Karnaca. The smell of a witch, his mother always used to say with a wink, her dark eyes glinting over the candlelight, and in those moments he wondered if she was speaking from personal experience. But his mother felt warm and she smelled like elderflower and silver dust from the winds in Batista; her presence did not chill the very air and she did not carry the scent of death about her.

“ _Daud_ ,” Billie hisses again, and he silences her with a gesture, peering around the edge of the pillar to watch as the witch saunters up to the pavilion.

She is tall and elegant, her hair cropped short against her skull which only serves to emphasise her high and defined cheekbones, giving her the look of an aristocrat. She wears a skin-tight outfit of fine fabrics twined with roses around her arms, her chest, her collar, the stems unstripped of their thorns.

She smiles, but it makes every muscle in his back clench.

“My dear, beloved half-sister,” the witch coos with venom on her tongue, tracing her long fingers along Jessamine Kaldwin’s jawline, peering into the Empress’s wide, horrified eyes. “Did you miss me?”

What, Daud thinks, the _fuck_.

* * *

It happens quickly.

The witch calls herself Delilah, the firstborn daughter of Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin – betrayed and denied that which was hers by right. The girl Emily is caught in her hold, her right wrist trapped in Delilah’s grip that does not loosen no matter how violently she struggles and shrieks, not even falling silent when Delilah backhands her across the face.

“Dear niece,” Delilah coos. “In time you will come to love me.”

“ _Don’t touch her!_ ” Jessamine Kaldwin cries, her voice an agonised moan. “Do whatever you want to me but _don’t hurt Emily_ –”

“Oh, my sweet Jessamine,” Delilah says. “Why would I hurt that which I intend to make _mine?_ ”

And with that, she shoots a vine through the Empress’s chest.

It’s Corvo’s howl of despair that will haunt Daud for months afterwards, though he does not realise it yet. All he knows is that the sound shakes him to his core, tastes bile at the back of his throat, and cannot bare to look around the edge of the pillar where he hides like a coward to witness the Empress being tossed to the dirt like some common, diseased Weeper being thrown into a pit.

The witch Delilah drags the screaming, struggling girl away by the wrist, yanking her hard behind her as she cries for her mother; Attano is hauled elsewhere out of sight, yelling Emily’s name, until the courtyard falls silent and the screams below and around are replaced by the snarling cries of victory of Delilah’s coven of witches.

“Daud,” Billie hisses again, and when he manages to meet her gaze through the mask, he realises his forehead is damp with cold sweat. “We have to leave! Now!”

Yes. Leave. He shouldn’t be here – he has no place being here. His mother always warned him to never make an enemy of a witch, and a witch has just become the new Empress of the Isles. He pushes himself to his feet while Billie makes sure their escape is clear, but looks behind him one last time, towards Jessamine Kaldwin, her body cast aside in the dirt like a rag.

Perhaps it’s madness, but he finds himself taking one staggering step after another, not towards the roof but towards the Empress he was ready to kill not ten minutes ago. Billie snarls his name but he ignores her and kneels beside the Empress, and feels his blade fall loosely from his grasp, clattering in the pool of her blood.

The Empress is _still alive_. He can hear her rasping for air, shuddering in the dirt as her blood spills from the wound in her chest, and Daud turns her over so her desperate, pained eyes meet his, the way they met seconds before his blade was to end her life instead. Beautiful, sad eyes, he thinks as the light fades from them. _Kind_ eyes.

“… _Emily_ ,” the Empress whispers, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. She chokes, shudders and stills, and Daud rips his glove off his right hand with his teeth to press his fingers against her neck where her pulse flutters, oh so very weakly. She is cold in Daud’s arms, on the cusp of death as her life runs out of her, and in that moment he feels the Outsider’s cold black eyes on the back of his neck, feels the world shift beneath his feet.

Then – ignoring Billie’s protest of shock and outrage – he gathers the Empress in his arms.

“What are you _doing_ , old man?”

“Burrows is dead,” Daud snaps, resting the Empress’s head against his shoulder. She is limp in his arms, the blood running from her chest, but she’s not dead. Not yet. “There’s no job anymore. We’re not getting the rest of the money.”

“Then leave her! She’s half-dead anyway, what does it matter?”

“She deserves better than to be left here to rot,” Daud says. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want a witch for an Empress. Do you?”

Though he cannot see her face he expects Billie is glowering at him, no doubt questioning his sanity, but she does not argue back this time.

“ _ALL HAIL OUR NEW EMPRESS DELILAH KALDWIN!_ ” the loudspeakers announce, drowning this gangrenous, diseased city with the taste of rotted roses and bitter poison. Daud shifts the dying Empress in his arms, and with Billie on his heels, he transverses across the rooftop, to the ventilation shafts, to the city streets, to safety. “ _LONG LIVE EMPRESS DELILAH, FIRST OF HER NAME!_ ”


	2. Jessamine | the last thing she felt

The young man who tries to save her life does not belong in this place.

His eyes are pained and his hands have a gentle touch, healing despite being raised by a man whose hands do violence. He speaks gently to her, murmuring her title, her name, reassuring her that he’s doing everything he can. He has a kindness in him, a tenderness that has not been tarnished by the murderers he is loyal to. _It’s okay_ , he whispers, a lie that he believes because somehow, in spite of the cruel childhood he endured at the hands of those he trusted and the darkness that pervades his life every single day, his heart has not been hardened, and the fact that she knows this frightens her more than anything else.

“Well?” she hears, a rough cigarette-damaged voice, neither cruel nor kind from somewhere close yet still so far away. A voice she remembers hearing as she lay in the dirt, her chest bleeding – a voice belonging to a man who would have traded her life to line his pockets with coin – and she tries to cry out in fear but no sound emerges from her lips. Her world is red and grey and black, the faces of her killers and saviours swimming in and out of her blurring sight like the rising tide of the polluted, whale-bloodied waters of the ocean consuming her with every breath, except she cannot _breathe_.

“I’m doing everything I can, but… sir, she’s not in a good way. I don’t think I can…”

He must. He _must_. She wants this pain to end and she wants the polluted tide to sweep her away, but Corvo’s wide eyes and outreached hand haunts her mind’s eye and Emily’s cry of terror rings in her ears as the woman she once loved as a sister – _so much pain, she has suffered so much and her heart is as black as the granite she carves_ – hauled her away, stealing everything that she held dear and making it _hers_. Emily needs her, her beautiful daughter who is so afraid but still so brave, beloved Emily Emily _Emily_ and she cannot must not _will not die_ , even as the life seeps out of her and the world which is so cold turns her blood to ice.

Then the pain eases and she is no longer in the bed that smells of elderflower and cigarette smoke in a rotting building that will one day crumble into the floodwaters. She is no longer herself as she steps upon the cool stone, suspended in an endless waterless ocean of sapphire blue, and feels as though she has been captured between one heartbeat and her last, the air in her lungs trapped before she can exhale for the last time.

She hears a name she distantly recalls as her own, beckoning her across the stone, leading her to the pavilion where she was supposed to die, to the ground where she was _not_ supposed to die. It is her but not her who feels the surge of the Void, feels it swell around her, gathering before her in a rush of ash as the great leviathans of the deep expanses keen in the background, their mellow song soothing the emptiness of her chest.

She is not afraid when he appears before her, his head tilted to the side, this man who is both so very young and so very, very ancient. Slender and elegant, a being who moves like liquid over glass, in this place that is somehow more real to her than the bed she is bleeding to death on, more real than the world she has tried to save from the encroaching infection rotting its limbs and poisoning its heart.

“Empress Jessamine Kaldwin,” the young man says, his voice like music and his eyes as black as pitch. “This _is_ a surprise.”

_What have you done to me_ , she tries to say. The words fall not from her lips, but echo around them instead, a whisper reverberating through the Void, and all he does is smile.

* * *

“What’s wrong with her?”

They will bring the bodies here, with rough hands. Rough hands and cages. Her suffering, dying people who looked to her to save them. Some of them will still be breathing when they hit water, so cold, like ice. It will be last thing they feel.

“Sometimes when people endure that much trauma, it damages their mind,” the kind young man who stopped the bleeding but does not know that the heart that beats in her chest is a thing of metal and wire replies. He twists his hands, and she knows he is wondering if she should have spared her this life, this fate – whether he should have let her life run from her chest, and allowed the release of death to free her from this world.

“Meaning?”

There will be a flood. Terrible floods, not enough to wash away the sorrows of Dunwall.

“She might never speak again. For all we know, her mind is gone too.”

“You should have left her to die,” the angry young woman says, the air about her seething at her father – no, their blood is not the same, he is just a man she loves as one would love a father – for his moment of weakness. His moment of _kindness_. “This is cruel, and it will be a burden to us. We can’t take care of a brain-dead deposed Empress.”

Empress. That was – that _is_ her. That is the name the man with glinting eyes as black as coal whispered to her, reminding her of what she was, what she is, trapped forever between life and death.

They butchered the deep ones here. The great leviathans, peaceful, dangerous creatures of the deeps, sacred and beautiful. They slaughtered them, sliced their flesh, silenced their songs, breathed in the rich stink of their enchanted flesh and carved their bones, runes that wash up upon the shore ever since the sea wall broke. Many strange things here were drowned and forgotten, and the waters will keep rising. Rising and rising and rising, so greedy for more, and they will never return what they will take.

…Why have these people _done this_ to her? Why did she _want_ this – how can she live this life of living death for years to come, this agony of the Void filling the wound in her chest, hearing and seeing everything and forcing it to run through her mind, endless and eternal. It’s too much. It’s too _painful_. She doesn’t want this, she shouldn’t have asked for this, _why did she ask him for this –_

_Emily._

Oh. Emily.

Emily Emily Emily her precious _Emily_ and she _could not would not did not die_ even as the life seeped out of her and the world which is so cold turned her blood to ice, not while her daughter is in the grasp of the witch with poison on her lips and thorned roses on her hands. The thing that beats in her chest, this cage of flesh and steel and wire, beats for Emily. Sweet, brave, terrified Emily, so innocent and kind but behind her frilly white dress and her eyes that see too much is a girl who shares the same monster with the man who would have ended her life on his blade, a girl who shares the same monster as the woman who drove vines through her chest and tossed her aside, oh _Emily –_

“Look at her. It’s been weeks since she woke up and all she does is stare at the wall. She still can’t even _feed_ herself. What if she _wants_ to die?”

Weeks. Has it truly been that long? That isn’t long at all – a blink, a mere fraction of a second in comparison all of history, everything that ever was and everything that will ever be. Weeks since she woke, weeks more since Delilah Copperspoon descended upon her world and murdered her ministers, her servants, her guards, weeks since Dunwall has plunged into terror and the plague has crippled the slums, weeks since the loudspeakers announced _ALL HAIL OUR NEW EMPRESS, DELILAH KALDWIN THE FIRST –_

“You are _not_ euthanising her,” the man orders his daughter – no, not daughter, just the girl he loves as much as Corvo loves Emily. A man with darkness in his heart, a rage burning hot in his soul – a rage that will one day burn out, leaving him empty and aching and so very _tired_. A man who despite all he has done, despite everything he has yet to do, has not yet lost that flicker of kindness, fluttering like an ember amongst the ashes of a dying fire. Vicious hands that moved to kill her; gentle hands that lifted her from the ground that was to be her resting place instead, altering the world forever.

"Why did you bring me here?" she hears herself whisper, and those around her start.

The boy with the black eyes did not understand the man's actions either - no, she remembers, not a boy, but god of the Void, who exists nowhere and everywhere at once, always watching, always curious. They call him the Outsider in this lifetime; others elsewhere called him the Leviathan. He was impressed by the man who had once drawn his attention only to lose it to repetitiveness, to predictability. He was _fascinated_. But she doesn't understand why her killer (saviour?) chose this. Money, perhaps? Does he think he will be rewarded for his charity?

Is she meant to forgive this man for what he did not do?

The man who murders her in a million million other lifetimes stares at her, and she meets the eyes of that scarred face, the last face Jessamine Kaldwin ever saw before she died. He would have looked into her eyes as he killed her; he would have seen it all, the light going out, the pain, the fear, the fate of Dunwall itself. This man whose blade brings an Empire to its knees in a million million other lifetimes; this man who kneels by her bedside now, curious and cautious and _hopeful_.

"Empress," he says, more a question than anything else.

Empress. He's speaking to her.

It feels…  _right_.

She feels the Void flow through her veins, her heart of metal and wire, her throat, moving her tongue by its own accord. “Your hands do violence,” the Void whispers, though hers are the lips that speak, “but there is a different dream in your heart.”

He jerks back, his teeth barred and his mouth a snarl, but his eyes are full of fear. " _What?_ "

Jessamine, she thinks. Her name is Jessamine Kaldwin. Mother of Lady Emily, lover of Lord Protector Corvo Attano, murdered and betrayed but _still alive_.

She draws breath and her murderer and saviour, the assassin Daud, the Knife of Dunwall himself, stares back at her, silent and waiting.

That's all right. He doesn't need to say a thing. She has already seen into his heart, the Void, her dying city, and for all the whispers of long-forgotten knowledge and dearly-held secrets in this world that stream through her mind like an endless waterfall, there is only one question she wants the answer to.

“Where,” Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, rightful ruler of the Empire of the Isles says, the thing of metal and wire and dead flesh pounding in her chest, “ _is my daughter?_ ”


	3. Corvo | the strength of his hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got this chapter done sooner than expected. Please enjoy, and thank you to everyone who took the time to review the last chapter!

The witch’s name is Breanna Ashworth, and two weeks ago she cut out his tongue.

“The mewling tongue is a valuable ingredient,” Delilah’s whore had told him, who otherwise looked quite elegant in her high-collared dress and leather boots if one ignored the fact that she held his dripping tongue in the glove of her right hand as she sheathed the blade with her left.

His wrists felt as though they chafed raw to the bone from straining against the shackles holding him in place, and his screams of agony drowned in a gurgle – the blood filled his mouth, his throat, spilled from his lips and down his chin, splattering across the dank cold floor where he kneeled before the witch. Breanna Ashworth had laughed, turning the bloodied tongue over in her hand.

“What was that, my dear Lord Protector?” she cooed, and reached out to grab his chin, yanking his head up to meet her gaze. Emily, he’d thought. Emily Emily _Emily_ – his daughter, who must be alive, she _must_ be, otherwise Ashworth would be taunting him with her death the way she has taunted him about Jessamine for six months – _oh god Jessamine, my love, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_ – instead of _this_. He tried to speak but choked on his own blood instead, the agony in his mouth, his head, his heart constricting his throat, and she laughed.

“I warned you what would happen if you asked about the brat again,” she’s said, and left him to drown in his own blood.

It’s taken him two weeks to learn how to swallow the blood and the trickle of water that runs down the grotty wall of his cell, another few days to break every bone in his left wrist to free himself of the shackles, and Breanna Ashworth isn’t fucking laughing _now_.

“You won’t find her,” the Empress’s whore gasps as he tightens his arm around her throat, throttling her the way she made him feel every single day for the last six months as she paced his cell and told him how Jessamine died alone in the dirt, crying for their daughter. “Delilah has hidden her away. The second you step foot in the palace, she’ll cut out your heart and _feed_ it to the girl.”

He growls.

It would be easy. Despite the loss of muscle tone in his arms and the brittleness of his bones, the constant agony lacing his body from the electrocution, the lashes, the barbed wire being wrapped around his chest, too weak to be of any use to Emily even if he has a hope of finding her, he knows there’s enough left in him that if he squeezes long and hard enough, he’ll choke Breanna Ashworth to death as surely as she killed him every single day since the day Jessamine died, tossed aside by the new Empress’s vines to bleed to death in the dirt.

It would be _easy_ to kill her. But it’s even easier to unsheathe the blade from the hilt around her waist, pull her tongue out, and slice it out of her mouth as she screams.

* * *

“Hello, Corvo. Your life has taken a turn, has it not?”

Is that a rhetorical question? Does the asshole expect him to _answer_? Where would he like him to start – with that day on the pavilion, helpless to defend Jessamine from the band of assassins who brought the witches upon the palace? Watching Delilah kill her before his eyes – watching Emily get dragged away?

Maybe the part where he was _tortured_ _for six months by witches_ before getting his _fucking tongue fucking sliced out of his fucking head_?

“The Empress has been deposed, your precious daughter Emily is being held by the woman who ruined your lives,” the Outsider recaps, oh so fucking helpfully, “and you will play a pivotal role in the years to come. For this, I have chosen you and drawn you into the Void. I am the Outsider – and this is my Mark.”

 _You_ could’ve _given me this six months ago,_ Corvo thinks, inordinately pissed off as the Outsider burns his Mark into his fucked-up left hand.

The Outsider’s mouth quirks, as though he knows exactly what Corvo is thinking. “How you use what I have given you falls upon you, as it has to the others before you.”

“Emily,” Corvo tries to say, but it comes out instead as a gurgled, “ _Ahmmahhy_ –”

“Breanna Ashworth did not lie,” the Outsider tells him, sparing him the humiliation. “Delilah _has_ hidden Emily away, beyond even my sight. But even if I could see her, you can do nothing right now.” He smiles, tilting his head to the side. “Your current condition is… wanting.”

Fucking bastard.

“Before I return you to your world, know that I will be watching with great interest, and that I leave you with a clue.” The Outsider leans close and whispers in his ear: “Find Daud.”

Corvo wakes up, the scent of dust and saltwater air replaced by the thick, rotting stench of bile and dead bodies and blood, on a damp mattress ridden with fungus in a leaking abandoned apartment in Drapers Ward, his left hand searing and his entire body stiff from the ice that grips his every muscle and joint.

Below him, down on the streets, the Dead Eels begin to slaughter the Hatters.

* * *

Without his tongue, he has no words; without words he cannot communicate, and the people he’s approached either run or try to kill him, thinking he is a Weeper ambling and groaning his way over to them, eyes bloodshot and body emaciated.

He might not be able to speak but he can still _hear_.

It’s funny what can happen in six months. Six months ago the plague was sweeping through the lower-class and slum districts – something, Corvo vaguely remembers, that troubled Sokolov. Empress Delilah Kaldwin, First of her Name, promised her people safety and prosperity, a cure for the plague – and word on the street is that she’s holding Sokolov hostage in the Tower, making him slave away to improve his Elixir.

Corvo is no longer worried the rats that scour the cobbled roads and breed in the bodies of Weepers. The real plague are the witches that crawl all over the ruined city like an infestation of cockroaches.

Dunwall is in ruins. Jessamine’s beloved city – which Corvo always thought was dying a slow death anyway, buried alive beneath bureaucracy and corruption – has been destroyed. The streets ripped up and strewn with the bodies of the City Watch officers brave enough to fight back or violent enough to use the chaos as an excuse to wantonly murder. Jessamine’s government collapsed into disarray after Arnold Timsh declared himself Prime Minister supporting Delilah’s claim to the throne and formed a faction that now resides in the Tower, and the other nobles have either fled the city entirely or been dragged down into the slums where everyone who breathes and poisons Dunwall’s air deserves to live.

Everything has been partitioned. The Overseers have split into two warring factions while the witches decimated Holger Square, and the gangs, of course, were the first to claim the streets, which they mostly owned anyway. Draper’s Ward was once a thriving fabrics and textiles production center, a hub of fine fabrics, but that all changed when the plague descended upon the streets. Six months ago the Hatters were in charge, and the Dead Eels floundered on the edges under Lizzie Stride.

Now, the Eels _own_ this place, and have decorated the streets with the bodies of the Hatters who didn’t surrender, and the only other significant gang left in Dunwall is… working with them.

Down below the broken window of his abandoned, filthy apartment where rats try to nibble at his stolen boots at night if he doesn’t kick them away, slurred voices start to raise.

“Yer fuckin’ lucky Slackjaw said yer gals are off-limits,” sneers a man Corvo _knows_ is with the Bottle Street Gang, pointing his finger in the face of an Eel as he staggers forward, an almost-empty bottle of booze in his hand and stains all down the front of his shirt.

“If it weren’t for Daud gettin' involved with Liz and Slackjaw I’d’ve smashed your ugly mug in weeks ago,” the Eel slurs back, and then a fist slams into a face and punches start flying and the group around them starts chanting – _fight, fight, fight!_

A cold hand reaches into his chest, grips his heart.

Daud.

In his capacity as Jessamine’s bodyguard, Corvo was required to be familiar with the main threats to her rule and to her life. The gangs that terrorised the city; the parliament that could turn hostile at any moment and seize control of the armies; the overzealous Overseers who would take to the streets on a holy crusade against witchcraft to sate their own desire to stomp on those who already had their faces pressed into the mud. But these were threats related to the stability of her administration; none of these would be enough to threaten her life.

The Knife of Dunwall, on the other hand –

That face. He’ll never forget that _face_. Hard and weathered, a long scar stretching down from the corner of his right eye to his cheek, a scowl on his face as he struck Jessamine and grabbed her throat and backed her up against the side of the gazebo, his sword inches from her chest. The legendary assassin, the nobles’ hired killer; a man who kills without remorse or regret or judgement, and only cares for the money that goes into his pocket.

Delilah must have paid him very, _very_ well.

And now it seems he’s decided to upgrade his skillset from merely being an indiscriminate butcher to – what? Brokering deals and uniting the gangs? What _for?_

Whatever it is, it can’t be good. Perhaps some noble has hired his services to create an army to oppose Delilah. Or maybe Delilah herself has paid him to help bring order to the streets. Either way, this can’t be a coincidence. Corvo’s breath catches in his chest and he scrapes the rest of the tin of whale meat clean with his fingers, swallowing the greasy morsels with difficulty, then tosses it into a corner of the room where the rats like to sleep and calls up on the Void, Blinking across to the other side of the street.

Find Daud, the Outsider had said, and that’s exactly what Corvo will to do. He’ll find the legendary Knife of Dunwall, the man who brought the witches upon the palace and led Delilah straight to Jessamine.

And then he’ll slit his fucking throat.

* * *

The trail leads him to Rudshore – or what’s left of it. A half-drowned city, crumbling at the edge of Dunwall, once a thriving financial district that will be washed away by neglect and despair. The guardians of this place are the ones who brought the witches to the palace; the ones in whaling masks and jackets, who appear and disappear in clouds of ash and dust, just like the witches do around the city.

The first one who realises Corvo has infiltrated the Chamber of Commerce – or what’s left of it – tries to cry out to raise the alarm, but Corvo slams Breanna Ashworth’s blade into his lower back, severing the spine at his waist, and Daud’s man collapses like a puppet whose strings have been sliced, twitching on the floor in shock. He’s more careful after this, sticking to the shadows; the others in his way he holds in Tyvian chokeholds until they pass out, and one he has no choice but to kill before yells for backup.

As he slips is way through the base, his eyes trail across the maps on the walls with arrows drawn all over them, spotting battle plans, annotations about which gang faction to approach, dossiers on the leaders and the troublemakers, all leading him to the heart of the base where the Knife of Dunwall leans over a desk.

That _face_.

He’ll never forget that face as long as he shall live – and he wants to look into the man’s eyes and watch the life fade from them as he drags his blade across his neck.

A young man in a whaling mask – a bodyguard, no doubt – is the first to notice Corvo steps into the office. He blanches and cries out – _“Sir!_ ” – and reaches for his own weapons, but Corvo is faster, Blinking behind him and thrusting the blade deep into the back of his right knee. The man – no, _boy_ , he sounds so very young as he cries out in pain – falls, and Corvo turns towards Daud.

At this point in his life, Corvo feels as the only thing fueling him is pain and rage and the thought of Emily trapped somewhere by the witch who murdered Jessamine in front of them both. Jessamine wouldn’t want him to be like this, he knows that, but Jessamine is _dead_ and this man – this monster, who barely brings his blade up in time to defend himself against a man who is more skeleton and fury than human – this man doesn’t deserve to live. He deserves to die in pain and alone, an undignified, unkind death in the dirt, the way he caused Jessamine’s death. Beautiful, kind, intelligent, wonderful Jessamine, the only light in this fucking poisonous world, didn’t deserve to die that way, didn’t deserve to die at _all_ , and Corvo _will have his revenge._

“Attano, wait,” the Knife of Dunwall grunts in between their blades smashing together. “Wait. Just – listen –”

He dares. He _dares_ ask for mercy – after what he _did_. Corvo growls and smashes Daud’s whaling sword – the sword that as good as killed Jessamine and tore apart his family and brought this city to its knees – aside, bringing the man to his knees, and presses Breanna Ashworth’s blade against his throat.

Daud’s eyes widen. “ _Wait_. Jessamine is –”

He doesn’t get to say her name. He has no right, no _Void-damned right –_

“ _Listen_ ,” Daud hisses, and the knife begins to slit the skin, “she’s _not dead_ , Attano. She’s alive, she’s not –”

Corvo’s eyes burn and his limbs shake. Lies. He’s a liar, he’s _fucking lying to him_ –

“Our fate rests on your effort, my love," a voice whispers from behind. "On the strength of your hands, and of your heart.”

That – that voice. He _knows_ that voice. It’s a trick, it can’t be her, it _can’t be_ , but he dares look behind him, just for a moment, and feels his body go numb.

“They may have taken your tongue,” Jessamine Kaldwin says, walking slowly over towards him where he still digs his blade into the assassin Daud’s throat, “but they cannot take your words.”

_Jessamine._

This isn’t a trick. This _can’t_ be a trick. It’s her, standing there in the doorway, her hair long and falling down past her shoulders. It’s her face, her eyes, her hands, her posture, her _voice_ , and there’s something wrong about her, something _so terribly wrong_ , but it’s still her, she’s alive and standing right there, as beautiful and as haunted as the last day he saw her, her eyes wide and sad and her hands outreached for him.

It’s as though he has been possessed. Corvo drops Daud to the floor and staggers over towards her, and pitches to his knees, the blade falling from his hand, and her hands rise to caress his long, filthy hair, pushing it back from his face. He moans and clutches her to him, shaking hard. She’s alive.  She's here. How is she here, _how is she alive?_ He saw her die, he saw Delilah throw her aside, _you were dead, I saw you die, they all said you were dead_ –

“I am not alive,” Jessamine whispers, and hears it now, in her voice – that whisper of the Void, twined through her tone. “Nor have I received the gift of death. Can you hear them too? Crying out in the dark?”

He doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t care because Jessamine is _alive_ , she’s alive and she’s here and he’s crying, agonised wails emerging from the mouth that cannot speak.

Behind him, he hears Daud pull himself to his feet, coughing and rubbing his neck, and kneels beside the one whose knee he drove his blade through. “My men,” the Knife of Dunwall growls, gripping his man’s shoulders, his glare one of fear and fury. “ _What did you do to my men?_ ”


	4. Delilah | the world lonely and cold

Timsh was amusing, for a time. He grovels before her and kisses her feet, but he is repetitive and the gifts he lavishes upon her pale in comparison to the riches the throne has offered her.

“Your trinkets to not interest me, Arnold,” Delilah snaps, lifting her foot to dig the heel of her boot into his shoulder where he knees, shoving him backwards. He staggers away, clutching his mother’s heirloom necklace to his chest, his eyes wide with despair.

“But –”

“You promised me the parliament would enforce my will.”

“They _do_ , my love –”

“You swore the people would love me.”

“Th-these things take _time_! Please, Empress! It’s only been seven months since Jessamine fell –”

She strikes him across the face for his simpering, the surge of satisfaction drowned by that name. Even in death – no, not death, her corpse went _missing_ , she could be anywhere – her sainted, treacherous sister haunts her.

“You will _not_ ,” Delilah says, voice low and cold, “ever speak that name again, Timsh.”

Timsh clutches his reddening cheek. “Y-yes, my Empress,” he whispers.

She sighs, and strokes her hand across his jawline. Wrinkled, old skin, spotted with age and cigars that she can barely stand to feel beneath her fingers. Once his flesh excited her, the feeling of wealth and status worshipping her body which was sustained on nothing else but the talent of her fingers and the beauty of her craft.

But that was before she was an Empress.

“Why do you provoke me?” Delilah murmurs.

“Forgive me, Delilah.”

She does not. She sends him away, and Timsh slinks off like a wounded hound, but he will return like the loyal creature his is, begging for his master’s praise and affection. She will give it to him, if he behaves.

After he is gone, her silent companion like a shadow at her side, touches her shoulder – a touch that not a month ago would have sighed into and returned with a caress. She pulls away now instead, disgust curdling in her stomach.

“What is it,” Delilah bites out, and Breanna instinctively tries to speak before remembering what the butcher Corvo Attano did to her. She gurgles pathetically and slams her mouth shut, cheeks the colour of ash, and instead reaches for the notepad at her side, scrawling out a message in hurried cursive before holding it out with pained eyes.

Delilah sighs.

“Thank you, Breanna,” she murmurs, casting her eyes across the note, and turns away from the broken woman whose tongue once wove words together like a tapestry, like a song of seduction that captured Delilah’s mind and heart – the woman whose tongue once brought her to the highest peaks of passion as they made love.

“ _She was shy in the Month of Hearths_ ,” Breanna recited, the year Delilah painted her portrait. She had lain across Delilah’s pillows and rugs, her hair undone and flowing around her shoulders – wearing nothing but a rose behind her ear and her body still flushed from their desire. Delilah’s hands moved like a skater upon ice, possessed with a hunger to capture Breanna’s brightness and beauty forever in a vibrant work. “ _Hiding from my scented letters; a sun-dappled cure for my loneliness. She was smiling in the Month of Rain, eating figs straight from the tree; a dream of sailing around the Isles_.”

Poetry always did sound so beautiful from Breanna’s lips.

“ _She was wed in the Month of Clans, to her sailor cousin from Cullero; a shrill bird, drilling at my chest_.”

Delilah tried to finish the portrait that night, but the work would remain incomplete until the next morning; the sound of Breanna’s voice, that low sensual murmur that had kissed her skin, compelled her to set her brush down.

“ _She was dying in the Month of Songs_ ,” Breanna said, “ _struck by a disease from the East; a terrible kiss on her distant lips._ ”

And Delilah had captured her mouth in hers, and put that brilliant tongue that rivalled her own to better uses.

Now Breanna Ashworth spills soup from her mouth and moans like a Weeper.

Breanna moves, reaching for Delilah with an expression shattered, but Delilah flicks her hand, dismissing the woman more loyal to her than any other in this miserable world.

“You may leave,” she says. “Send the guest in on your way out. I will see her alone.”

Breanna does not move.

“Do not make me repeat myself, Breanna,” Delilah snaps and looks away, unable to bear the sight of high-chinned, haughty, beautiful Breanna Ashworth’s impression of Timsh as she slips away, her shoulders fallen and her face pale, leaving Delilah alone in her throne room.

Her hand aches to grasp her brush and weave the colours across a canvas, but she has not painted in months.

There will be a dance here, soon, she decides, trailing her fingers across her throne. A grand one, held in a few short months’ time, to commemorate her first year as Empress. There will be the finest orchestra in all of Gristol to play her music and sing her songs, the best chefs to fill the kitchens, a thousand candles to light the palace she won, the palace that should have been hers all along.

“You are my daughter,” the Emperor whispered to her once, in the dead of night. “My eldest. And someday, if you are good, you will have everything you are owed.”

“Will I get to go to the dances, like Jessamine?” Delilah whispered back, her eyes wide and her mind filled with fantasies of those beautiful galas held every fortnight, rooms full of spinning women in elegant dresses and men in elaborate animal masks, the ballroom alight with candles and chandeliers, fruit platters and champagne fountains as high as her eyes could see. Jessie always looked beautiful, in finely-cut clothes designed by her personal tailor, where Delilah had nothing more than the worker’s uniform, her apron spotted with food stains and her face perpetually covered in flour, never allowed anything more than to watch from a distance and hear the distant sound of the orchestra. But she imagined herself beside Jessie, wearing the most beautiful dress of all, the envy and glory of all of the Isles, her hand in her sister’s as they made their entrance down the grand staircase.

“All the dances you want,” Euhorn promised.

“Oh, papa,” she sighed, feeling as though she could cry, but Euhorn tutted and pressed his finger to his lips.

“You must keep this secret, Delilah,” he told her. “And you _must_ behave. Or else –”

“I’ll be good, p— Emperor Euhorn,” Delilah said, clutching her work apron. “I promise!”

She had been young, then. Naïve. Her head full of fantasies of standing before her father before all the world to see; pride in his eyes instead of wariness and pity, the clothes on her back finely tailored to rival the fabrics that Jessamine didn’t even appreciate. Once her sainted sister wore a silk gown to a game of hide-and-seek, laughing when she splashed mud on the hem and ruined outfit, all while Delilah picked her rattiest clothes and tried to keep those as clean as possible because her mother could afford nothing else. Even as the years ticked by and Euhorn’s promises became more strained, she still _believed_ – dreaming of sitting upon the throne that was hers by right, ruling the Empire, dancing with every man and woman who begged for even a morsel of her attention instead of being forced to lower her head while unworthy nobles passed her by without so much as a second glance.

She believed him, until the day she didn’t.

Euhorn lied. He spoke sweet words into her ear to keep her silent, until he no longer needed to because he’d found the perfect excuse to banish her from his palace forever, casting her into the filth and muck from which he thought she would never claw her way out of to seize that which she was owed.

 _Look at me now, papa_ , Delilah thinks, the throne cold beneath her as she gazes upon the Empire she won. _I shall go to all the dances I please_.

But the Plague is consuming the very streets she had survived as a child. The people cough instead of sing and do not look up at her with love in their bleeding eyes. This is not the Empire her father promised her and the ballroom is as empty as her chest, the beating of her heart echoing around an endless chasm that screams and screams and screams.

The young woman appears with a rush of ash, bowing before her and capturing Delilah’s mind before it can turn once more to the despair that not even her painting can brush away. Delilah breathes and steps down from her throne to meet the woman who burns brightly in her coat of red, reigniting the dying embers in Delilah’s heart.

“Come, my dearest,” she says. “What news do you have for me?”

* * *

The flickering flame simmers now as a low burn, a gentle fire stoked in her chest which spurs her creativity. She finds herself before the painting that leads to her gallery, a corner of reality she has bewitched and folded into the canvas, hidden from all except her.

This is her sanctuary. Her comfort. The Void exists here as a background to her creation; the crystal clear blues of the endless expanse hanging in the background, weaved from the paint of her brush and the power of the Mark seared upon her skin. Her gallery decorates the open island, her works hanging in the air and leaning against the rocks, an explosion of colour and beauty that was once part of the main area until the wretched child took something sharp to the canvases and tore them.

“What do you think?” she hears the girl ask, voice uncannily sincere in a way Delilah does not often hear. There is something sweet to it; innocent, a tone that reminds her of herself, blinking up at the Emperor with too-wide eyes and desperately seeking his love, his approval.

Sokolov clears his throat. “Perhaps if I can make a small _suggestion_ , Lady Emily,” he says, which is uncharacteristically diplomatic of him.

“Sure.”

“It’s dreadful.”

Ah. There he is.

“That’s _not_ a suggestion,” Emily says hotly, and the corner of Delilah’s mouth twitches.

“Hmph,” Sokolov grunts, casting a dismissive eye over her scribbles. “It is a mediocre attempt at portraiture that relies too heavily on the grotesque concept of the abstract.”

“Anton,” Delilah cuts in, and both Sokolov and Emily turn towards her, matching scowls upon their faces. If Delilah did not know for sure from reading Jessamine’s journals, she might well have mistaken Anton for the girl’s father. “You’ve spent enough time with her. Return to your laboratory and continue working on the cure.”

Sokolov pats Emily on the shoulder and rises.

“Ah, Delilah,” he says, passing her. “Tell me. Does your victory feel hollow yet?”

“I tire of your attempts at wit, old man,” Delilah says. “It has been more than seven months and you have less and less to prove your worth with each passing day. Is the task I have assigned you too strenuous?” She tilts her head, a thorned sneer curving her lips. “You’ll be pleased to know Piero Joplin still lives. Perhaps if _you_ cannot develop a cure –”

“That wretched idiot,” Sokolov scoffs. “You couldn’t possibly think _he_ is capable of –”

“Give me a reason I should not.”

Idle threats to not work on this man who noticed her talent one day as she painted on the corner of a street for coins; this man who took her in as an apprentice and placed a proper brush in her hand and taught her philosophy and science and art, but suppressed the style which came to her as easily as breathing. He has laughed in the faces of captors, torturers and witches and knows her threats to replace him with the fool Joplin are meaningless.

But if he has one thing, it is pride.

Sokolov draws himself up, furious she would even _consider_ replacing him with his dreaded rival who by all accounts can barely string two sentences together without stammering like a fool. “Bring me more subjects,” he snaps at Delilah, and returns to the laboratory she painted into existence for him.

When the girl does not swear and bite and snarl, she ignores Delilah instead. This is one of those days, which if anything infuriates her more than childish rage. Emily sits at her table, her head down and the pencil in her hand moving hard and fast over the scrap pieces of paper Delilah provides her for her own entertainment. Delilah rarely pays attention to the scribbles, but Anton’s words remind her of his own critiques of Delilah’s portraits, and she stands over her niece’s shoulder now, watching her work.

“This drawing,” she finally says slowly, tilting her head to examine young Emily’s mediocre attempt at abstract portraiture. “What is it of?”

“You,” Emily says, looking up with her eyes of steel as if daring Delilah to strike her across the face again. “But dead.”

Delilah is unable to help it; the corner of her mouth twitches and she smothers a sharp laugh, seeing for the barest of moments not the spoiled child of her sainted sister but a younger version of herself, full of fury and bitterness and a savage bite, raging against that which she cannot yet control. She doesn’t remember Jessamine being quite so… _vicious_.

“Have you titled it?” Delilah drawls, amused.

Emily shrugs and returns to the drawing, pencilling away. “It’s called ‘Deadlilah’.”

Under normal circumstances Delilah would punish the girl for her impertinence, but though childish and simple behind the colouring that falls outside of the awkward lines, there’s a hint of true abstract talent – not that Anton Sokolov, with his adherence to outdated styles, could tell the difference between trash and brilliance even if it slithered up his ass. She watches her young niece work through narrowed eyes, the tension of the girl’s hand gripping the pencil as though she is imagining wringing Delilah’s neck.

“I’m not finished!” Emily snaps as Delilah swiftly snatches the drawing, intending to examine it further.

“Be still, you little ingrate,” Delilah tells her, her mind turning. “I’ll return tomorrow with paint and canvas.”

Emily scowls. “Why?”

Delilah isn’t sure why either, but the violent pencil strokes stirs something in her and she wonders what Emily Kaldwin will do if she places a brush and palette in her hand instead of a crayon. “I’m curious,” she replies, folding the picture and tucking it into her pocket and moves to depart her gallery.

“Corvo’s going to come back for me,” Emily warns. “And when he does, he’s going to kill you.”

Delilah pauses and turns back, reaching out to stroke the face that reminds her so much of her own. Jessamine stole everything from her once; her wretched bodyguard took everything else.

But _this_. This, Delilah will claim, too.

“Oh, little sparrow,” she murmurs, the fire burning in her chest, and grips Emily’s chin, stopping the girl from flinching away from her touch. A smile spreads across her mouth, and Emily’s eyes widen with fear. “I doubt that very much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Liked it? Hated it? Let me know in the comments! x


	5. Daud | for what he did

Thomas never was much of a talker. That's Billie's domain; the only one amongst his Whalers who would dare speak back to him and wryly call him old man with a drawl in her tone and fondness in eyes hidden behind the mask. Thomas is professional, frank. He speaks when spoken to, he curtly provides the information required without teasing or depreciating jokes. A serious young man from the day Daud brought him into the fold, but far from a mute.

Now he speaks even less than Attano.

"Thomas," Daud says again, trying to urge the young man's eyes up to meet his. Thomas, as always, keeps his gaze low, as though ashamed to look Daud in the eyes as he pushes the chair Joplin rigged up for him away. "We could use you at the meeting."

He shakes his head, the chair creaking as he fumbles, still learning how to control the clumsy thing in this rotting building that isn't even fit to house rats but fine for assassins with supernatural abilities. Fine for Thomas, only a month prior, who could almost rival Billie in her ability to melt into the shadows and transverse from rooftop to rooftop, slipping between impossible cracks and ledges like a creature of the night.

But not suitable for a man who cannot walk.

“You don’t need me,” Thomas mutters, voice dull. Daud would give anything to hear his voice turn cold and hard and angry, and fights the urge to take his man by the shoulders and shake him until Thomas _reacts_.

He doesn’t, though – Rinaldo advised him not to. Said something about it being ‘mentally counterproductive’ and ‘not an appropriate way to deal with coming to terms with trauma, and just because your mother did it to you doesn’t mean you should to it to Thomas’, so on and so forth.

Perhaps if Rulfio were here –

Daud snarls to himself, breaking off that thought. “Thomas,” he tries again, rubbing his forehead, but Thomas has fallen silent and despondent.

“I’ll stay with him, sir,” Rinaldo says, limping past him. Daud grimaces and nods, almost but not quite reaching for Thomas’s shoulder before he leaves.

One day, Daud thinks, he’ll drive his blade into Attano's back and sever _his_ spine –

But the Empress asked him not to.

She speaks in riddles and stares off into the distance, before turning her vacant, all-seeing gaze to him and delivering a line that without fail will make his blood run cold and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. She moves as silently as a shadow at night, appearing behind him when he least expects it, to say something unnerving like _your mother searches for you still_ , or _your heart will turn to ash when the fire burns out_.

“If I wanted a therapy session,” he’d grunted, only slightly irritable, “I’d go to the Golden Cat. Keep your drivel to yourself.”

She’d smiled at him. “You went there once as a younger man,” she said. “You think you might enjoy it more if it’s with someone you care for.”

“Sex doesn’t interest me, but thanks for the offer.”

Corvo Attano, on the other side of the room, shot him the filthiest glare Daud thinks he’s ever received in his entire life, but Daud doesn’t care much for Corvo Attano’s opinions, or expressions, or life, or anything about him really, and would kill him without remorse to exact revenge for Rulfio's life, except for the fact that Attano means something to Jessamine. Jessamine, who can hear his every thought and see into his heart which surely must be as painful for her to look into as the suffering and despair of the city she longs to save.

“Your heart has not rotted as much as you think it has,” Jessamine said cryptically, and departed, her fingers carding through his hair as she swept away.

He’s… getting used to it.

Daud, generally, does not allow people to touch him. Billie is an exception – she shaved him once when his arm was fucked up and he could barely lift it, tilting his head back and calling him ‘old man’ and commenting wryly that she could take over the Whalers with a single move, and Daud laughed as she dragged the blade across his stubble. But that’s _Billie_ , and that’s different, even if she’s been watching him closely lately, studying his decisions and each move he makes. That’s nothing new – even as a kid she was quietly curious. The strange questions, coming from odd angles, about what he’s thinking about – probably prodding to check his sanity, cautious as to why he’d go from about to kill the Empress of Isles to devoting his services to her. He doesn’t blame Billie for this; if their positions were reversed, he'd probably do the same to her. The point is, he’d still trust her to tilt his head back and rest a shaving blade to his throat. Anyone else who has dared that physical proximity has ended up with a broken wrist or worse.

But Jessamine… _moves_ something within him, something he cannot, or will not, put a name to. He does not mind it when she touches his shoulder, his face, with a cool and gentle hand and speaks her strange words. A touch that feels like fresh water, cleansing and purifying, as though this woman is washing him of the blood upon his hands.

His Whalers haven’t said so, but he can feel it in the air about their stances, the disapproving silences, that they think it’s strange he obeys Jessamine Kaldwin. It’s not that he holds the aristocracy in particularly high regard – he’s killed too many of those with blue blood to care for hierarchies and the supposed superiority of royalty. They’re all the same, those rich, self-entitled, self-important corrupt citizens who take advantage of those beneath them and backstab those they’d smiled and fucked only hours before.

The Empress is different. If he’d killed Jessamine – if Delilah had not staged her violent coup that same day –

Well. There’s no point in thinking about _if_ s. The throne belongs to Jessamine, and it will be hers again, and Lady Emily will be returned to her – if the army he’s putting together for her will fucking _cooperate_.

“Ah, yes,” Walter Halcombe says icily, arms crossed over the chest of his uniform. “‘Overseer’ Martin. We’re acquainted.”

“ _Walter_ ,” Teague Martin replies, a sneer to his lips. “I do believe that’s the name you prefer to go by, is it not?”

It’s a work in progress.

“We’ll skip the introductions if you know each other,” Daud says, desperately disinterested in all matters associated with the Abbey of the fucking Everyman. It only took four months to break the deadlock between the warring factions of the Overseers and the tension shows; Martin and Halcombe glower at each other, the air burning with their mutual distaste, tempered – or made worse – by the distant sound of Lydia Boyle’s harpsichord, the discordant melody tightening the air and making it difficult to concentrate. Daud rubs his head, feeling a wretched ache creep up behind his eyes. “I don’t care what your factional ideological differences are. The Overseers might be our only hope of dismantling Delilah’s coven, so one of you needs to be in charge. Who’s it going to be?”

“Presumably,” Halcombe bites out, offended that Daud has even brought up the idea his candidacy was in doubt, “it will be the one who is _actually_ an Overseer.”

“If you’re going by that logic,” Martin says, “then neither of us qualify.”

They begin to trade verbal barbs once again, hands almost upon their swords.

Corvo Attano looks ready to kill them both, scowling silently in the corner, the one thing Daud can at least agree upon with him.

“ _Enough_ ,” Daud snarls, silencing the two when the sneering jibes become unbearable. “You can have a pissing contest after we take the witch down. If you don’t come to an arrangement within in the hour I’ll flip a fucking coin. Sound good?”

“So alike in ambition,” Jessamine tells him after he locks both men in a holding cell for the night, partly because they haven’t reached an arrangement but mostly because Daud hates them both, “and as trustworthy as each other.”

“So, not at all?”

Jessamine smiles, that vacant look she gets when the Void runs through her veins more than her own blood does. “If one falls, so too will the other – and they will burn in the Void together for all eternity.”

“Too bad,” Daud grunts. “They’re what you’ve got.”

“Perhaps you ought to flip that coin after all,” the Empress says, and Daud laughs.

* * *

The Outsider, of course, finds this situation all rather amusing.

“Daud,” the black-eyed bastard says, appearing before Daud in a rush of ash, a smirk upon his mouth. “Will you never cease to surprise me?”

“Should I be flattered you’re giving me time of day again, or wary?” Daud bites out.

The Outsider doesn’t laugh, but the corner of his mouth does curve into a smile. “Once you craved my attention, my old friend. Has so much changed between us? It seems you certainly have. Instead of killing the Empress, you pledged your allegiance to her – and now you’re raising her an army. The gangs united, a noblewoman’s financial backing, an inventor to arm your Whalers, and now you’re negotiating a standoff between the Overseer factions. For a man who spent his entire life killing for coin, you _have_ made quite the turnaround. Did you save her because you knew there would be no payment? Was it guilt, for all the lives you claimed over the years, that prompted this?” The Outsider tilts his head. “Or perhaps an emotion you’d rather not name?”

“Maybe I fancied a mid-life career change,” Daud growls. “Unless you’re here to help us take down Delilah, you can fu–”

“I don’t take sides, Daud,” the Outsider says, cool as ever. “Delilah is exceedingly bright, her coven is strong, and she outplanned everyone to claim the throne. You have an army of lowlife street gangs, warring priests who would as soon burn you at stake for heresy –”

“And Corvo Attano,” Daud says tersely, thinking of the Outsider’s mark upon the Lord Protector’s hand. “Thanks for not mentioning to him that I saved the Empress, by the way. Or did it amuse you to know he might have shot first and asked questions later?”

“So cynical, Daud,” the Outsider murmurs. “Will your plan be enough? You’ve not wasted time since Delilah began her reign, but you and the Empress and her bodyguard are years behind, and you still haven’t found Emily Kaldwin. You’d better hurry, Daud. Change is coming. I just wonder if it’ll be yours, or Delilah’s.”

Daud growls again, ready to launch himself at the Leviathan in an attempt to wrap his hands around his neck and strangle him until he chokes out a clear answer, but the Void shoves him and he’s back in the real world, warm and thrumming rune in hand, shrine empty and cold before him. He snarls and tucks the rune away, and wonders if he can get enough of a rise out of Attano again to land a few punches in ‘self-defence’ before Jessamine breaks them up.

He begins to head back to the Flooded District, lining up a long transversal across the rooftops, when the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and from the corner of his eye he sees Lurk – crouched on a rooftop, too far to transverse across to. He pretends he hasn’t spotted her, and she doesn’t move; she just watches him, through her mask which hides her face but cannot obscure the intensity of her gaze.

It’s odd, he thinks. Something to watch. He cannot abide a mystery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why am I so mean to the Whalers. :') Thank you to everyone who has been reviewing this little project! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Sorry about the delay between updates!


	6. Jessamine | all the lights in the sky

She can feel a great age ending.

Not so long ago, Dunwall was a proud city; built on the bones of the great ones, the heart of the Empire of the Isles drew the finest minds of the Academy’s scientists and philosophers to its capital to share knowledge and wisdom and technological advancements.

She tastes the rust and decay with every breath of air she draws; air she breathes out of habit, air she thinks she still needs, air she doesn’t need because this body of hers lives only because of the thing of flesh and metal beating in her chest. She tastes the doom of Pandyssia upon the city; she breathes the rotting roses of the false Empress’s reign that bleeds the city dry even as the world slowly drowns. Delilah does not burn the whales, but the great ships have stopped bringing their hauls and when the last leviathan is gone, darkness will fall.

Not for many years yet, however. She will be gone then, she thinks.

She will be glad to rest.

What month is it? Time has lost all meaning. Month of Harvest when she died, Month of Seeds now, the calendar says, but the river rushed in when the barrier broke and the whole district went dark, and Daud’s parchments are water-damaged and the paper of his books wrinkle from the moisture, so she cannot trust the blurred-ink markings upon the calendar.

She feels a hand upon her shoulder and returns to her mind, herself and not herself at the same time. Corvo’s face swims into her vision, forehead creased into a frown, constant anger simmering below the surface that stops the despair from consuming his mind with thoughts of Emily in danger, Emily scared, Emily alone in the grasp of the witch who destroyed everything they both hold dear. She can hear every single thought in this wretched city, crying out for help while Delilah kills it piece by piece, everyone, except for her precious Emily. Emily Emily _Emily_ , eight months separated and surely she cannot be dead for Delilah would have tormented Corvo, Delilah would make an announcement, surely even Delilah could not harm a child despite the blackness in her heart of hardened granite. She can feel this in Corvo’s mind, his heart that burns to stop the bleeding because when he looks at her she can hear the words he cannot speak, feel the agony in his heart – _what did that bastard to do you?_ – and he feels guilty for being relieved she is alive even though every single moment of her existence she feels those vines piercing her chest and the constant noise of toxic secrets creep into her mind –

_Jessamine._

She breathes, and leans forward, resting her forehead to Corvo’s, twining her fingers through his. “Why am I so cold?” she whispers.

Corvo tries to speak, forgetting he cannot, and releases a growl of frustration. He moves his arm around her shoulders instead and holds her. _We will get Emily back_ , she hears, in the voice he will never again be able to use _. We will make this right._

“I have faith in you, my love,” she whispers, but wonders how anyone – how he, how Daud, how the army he has formed in her name – can have faith in _her_ when she balances the wire between life and death and loses herself more often than she is real. He kisses her, mouth hard against hers, and she remembers what it is like to be _alive_.

Daud does not intend to interrupt them, but Corvo pulls away immediately when her murderer in a million million other lifetimes arrives. They glare at each other, their stand-off as bitter as the Month of High Cold, until Daud snaps at him that he has to talk strategy with the Empress and if Corvo has nothing to contribute then he can fuck right off and gargle at the dogs.

Corvo’s fist collides with his jaw, and Jessamine sighs.

“He does not hate you,” she says, after they’ve finished pummelling each other and Corvo has stalked off with fewer wounds and a vulgar, triumphant sneer. Daud rolls out the blueprints of the palace before her, his eye blackened and his lip split and bleeding. “He is jealous, but will not admit so. You should not taunt him.”

“Quite a pair the two of you make,” Daud grunts. “You’re his tongue, he’s your attack dog.”

“He regrets the life he took,” Jessamine whispers. “The pain he caused.”

“Regret isn’t going to bring Rulfio back or make Thomas walk again.”

“You are two sides of the same coin,” she says, the Void speaking through her, cold like ice. “All that rage, stoking the fires in your hearts to stop the fear and grief that seeps into your bones from consuming you both –”

“ _Enough._ ”

She’s gone too far. The Void burns to whisper more, to help him _see_ , but Jessamine Kaldwin can feel his pain and there’s enough of that in this world. She threads her fingers through the strands of the Knife of Dunwall’s hair and he sighs, leaning into her touch.

Then he pulls away, and gets down to business.

* * *

When people live in close quarters together, forced into cooperating with each other against their better judgement but in the name of the greater good, strange things begin to happen. It is the nature of humans to be peculiar; to backstab or make peace, to fight or fuck. Daud doesn’t trust the gangs or the Overseers as far as he can throw them but a witch infestation makes odd bedfellows out of pious men and criminals of the street and killers for coin, kept loyal by the gold of a noble woman whose motives are her own.

This is her army. It’s a strange one, but it will do, and Dunwall will never be the same again after this.

Perhaps that’s for the best.

The throne looked the other way when it came to gang-related activities; Empress Jessamine knew how to play the game, curbing the violence when it got out of hand, but otherwise allowing the city to maintain its symbiosis of order and chaos. One cannot exist without the other, and Delilah only spreads chaos. The Parliament burned to the ground last week.

She’s bad for business.

The man known as Slackjaw was raised by whores; he will never know his father was a prince who once asked Euhorn for Jessamine’s hand in marriage. He deals in flesh, weapons and strong drink and he knows the streets of Dunwall better than any man, especially its dark alleys. Daud says he is as good as his word, and his word is coin and knife; she trusts him as much as she trusts anyone whose influence is felt over the entire Island of Gristol.

Lizzie Stride is the one Daud trusts; not her Eels, who backstab and betray as easily as they wantonly cause destruction and piss in corners of the building, but the woman herself, an oddly principled woman in a world that has been so cruel to her. She decorates her skin with ink and sneers at the men who underestimate her and then pay the price for it. Slackjaw respects strength and determination; Lizzie is drawn to his businessman-like demeanour. They are night silent when the night falls.

Jessamine has seen stranger couples form when circumstances demand it.

The Overseers still have not come to an arrangement, but a truce holds for now between the two men who would use her for their own causes. There are few wise enough to look the Outsider in the eyes and politely decline his gifts, his curses, but Walter Halcombe is one – not because he fears heresy, but because he knows the hearts of men and the depths to which they are capable of sinking. He matches Teague Martin step for step, the man who was brave enough to laugh in the Outsider’s face, whose talk of Strictures are deceiving – the weight of his crimes heavy on his soul. Martin has been a soldier, a highway robber and a man of faith; Halcombe is a boy of the Abbey, a runaway noble, and they both have always had their sights set on the Abbey’s highest office and wonder which is more powerful – the knife or the tongue. Martin thinks the knife; Walter, the tongue.

It's hard to say which of them is correct.

She sees them in Walter Halcombe’s mind; Halcombe’s back pressed to the wall, Martin’s body hard against him, all that intensity and fascination and mutual disdain for each other spilling out uncontrollably and culminating in this, not ten minutes prior, where they rutted desperately and mouths moved together, smothering moaned names and filthy groans most unbecoming of would-be High Overseers. She sees Halcombe shaking with a longing he rarely permits himself, come undone by Martin who rarely denies himself. She sees Martin frowning, confused by his own desire but not disgusted, his hands reaching for the belt around Halcombe’s waist, longing to feel him – sees Halcombe still and break their kiss, his face hardening and his hands catching Martin’s to push them away, shaking his head. _Don’t_ , he’d said, face a twisted scowl, storming away so spare himself the inevitable humiliation.

She sees Martin grimace and call after him – _Walter!_ – and sees him slam his hand against the wall, furious with himself as Halcombe leaves.

“You needn’t fear,” the Void whispers through her lips. “He won’t laugh at you. He’ll make it feel good.”

She’s beginning to think the Outsider is a bit of a gossip.

Halcombe starts as though she has slapped him with an open palm, but keeps his expression neutral and mild. This will serve him well, one day – if he survives. He inclines his head, a slight frown on his forehead. “Empress,” he murmurs, and leaves.

If one falls, so too will the other, and they will burn in the Void together for all eternity. But maybe – just maybe – they don’t have to fall at all.

* * *

When Lydia Boyle is alone, she plays the harpsichord. It was part of the arrangement she made with Daud in exchange for her life – that he would allow her to bring her beloved instrument to play when her mood sinks low and her heart grieves for the sisters she lost to the witches who stormed the city and decimated the nobles, destroying their lavish homes and stealing their fine jewellery.

In another life this woman would have played music for Hiram Burrows. She is one of the finest musicians in the city, and the sound of her elegant music fills the Chamber of Commerce, a sad, mellow tune. She misses her sisters more than she misses the life she left behind. Though she is neither a talker nor a great beauty, she has cultivated other qualities to survive, not just the nobility but this, right now; she said the right words and she bent the right knees to throw her lot in with the resistance, but no longer has to worry about rumours and secrets or the loose lips of her servants because no one cares anymore, not here, not in the company of whores and thieves and killers.

She does not say anything when Jessamine lingers in the room where she plays her tunes, closing her eyes and allowing the music to wash over her. Gentle, sorrowful music, but underneath it a tone of fury and rage, burning for vengeance for the sisters who fell to the witches. One did not die immediately; Esma staggered to the streets and was swept up with the Plague, and died with her daughter's name upon her lips.

“Thank you,” Jessamine whispers when Lydia Boyle's tune comes to an end. “You will have the revenge you crave.”

This is the only promise Lydia Boyle needs; this is the only loyalty Jessamine asks for.

Lydia Boyle bows her head. “My Lady,” she replies.

* * *

The Whalers who disapproved of what Daud did left the fold months ago to make their own way in this wretched world, to varying degrees of success and ruin. One tried to make a bid for leadership, and Daud cut him down as swiftly as he would have stilled Jessamine’s heart if Delilah had not done so first. The ones who remain are used to her now, accepting her as part of their ranks as she moves between them. She knows all their names though they guard their secrets closely, watching her with a mixture of awe and fear because she is under their leader’s protection, and now Corvo too guards her with a near-feral growl and a blade in his hand that deters them from attempting anything foolish.

The one called Thomas, who remains in the chair Piero designed for him and speaks little and smiles less, doesn’t seem to mind her company. She sits with him sometimes and lets the Void consume her, whispering the secrets of Dunwall’s skeleton until the words twine together and she does not know where one phrase ends another starts. He likes this, she thinks – likes that she does not gaze at him with pity in her eyes like some of the other Whalers do, or frustration for being unable to help like Daud, and he is not ashamed to be near her the way he is around the man he cannot bear to disappoint.

Broken and wounded creatures have a way of seeking each other’s company.

“He cares for you,” Jessamine says. “You should not be ashamed. You are worth more to him than the legs you walked upon.”

Thomas frowns but does not reply, and Jessamine feels he wishes to be alone again now. She takes his hand and leaves, allowing the young man with kind eyes and a gentle voice who tried to save her life to take her place.

Outside, the angry young girl in the red coat is waiting for her.

“Leave him alone,” she hisses, her heart of fire and brimstone burning fiercely. “Thomas would still be walking if it wasn’t for you and your rabid hound. He doesn’t need your cryptic bullshit.”

“You fear this is the end of the Whalers,” Jessamine says, “and that Daud has lost his mind.”

“Stay out of my head,” Billie Lurk snaps. “The old man was a fool to not have left you to die.”

“She has bathed your heart in poison,” she hears herself whisper, a melody of the Void itself seeping through her tones even as the ice of the great expanse runs through her veins, and Billie Lurk reels back, her mouth a scowl and her fist clenched. “Her words are like the roses she wears, so beautiful and sweet like honey that she whispers in your ears, but the thorns will shred your skin.”

“You don’t know _anything_ ,” Billie Lurk snarls.

“If you confess,” Jessamine says, “he will forgive you.”

The girl stares at her, then vanishes in a rush of ash of the Void.

Time is meaningless to her; sometimes hours pass and it feels like moments, sometimes moments pass and they feel like centuries. But Jessamine Kaldwin is still there, somewhere, and she fights the pull of the Void to reach the men she loves, the heart of metal and wife frantically beating a song of panicked terror behind her sternum.

Corvo catches her as she reaches for them, eyes wide with fear for her, and she clutches him, the strength of his hands grounding her in this world, the strength of his heart beating for them both.

“What’s wrong?” Daud demands, seeing her fear.

“She has not told you,” Jessamine says, the thing inside her chest breaking for this man she both hates and loves.

“Who hasn’t told me _what_?”

“Your daughter,” she whispers to Daud, and tears begin to spill down her cheeks, as cold as ice. “If you act quickly, we may yet survive the night.”

The first alarm rings out, loud and true, as shouts of panic begin to ripple through the Flooded District. Daud arms and readies himself, eyes wide and teeth bared; Corvo steadies his blade, and the first vines erupt through the rotted floors, the crumbling walls, the shattered windows, as the witches descend upon the Chamber of Commerce consuming this sanctuary of hope, and all the lights in the sky begin to flicker and die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so overwhelmed by the response to this story - thank you so much to everyone who has been reading and especially to those of you who took the time to comment. You're all so wonderful. Thank you <3 <3

**Author's Note:**

> If you've a moment to spare, please consider leaving a review! All feedback is deeply appreciated. xx


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